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Memories in Juvenile Delinquency

The other day I found myself musing that the young peoples of San Francisco have never engaged in what I consider to be a hallmark act of being young and dumb:

Throwing snowballs at cars.

There simply isn’t any snow here.

Back home, when I was growing up, where I lived afforded us a unique and powerful advantage geographically for this. Our house was at the top of a large hill. Behind the house, and down the hill, was about three acres of forest. If you continued directly through the forest, you would eventually find yourself atop a steep cliff that had been cut out of the rock, at the bottom of which ran one of Huntington’s major in-roads: route 52, known locally as 5th street.

From here, groups of us (read: every kid in the neighborhood, about 15 or 20) would gather and spend a half hour stockpiling ammunition out of sight. Once that was done, we merely needed to softly lob our frozen missiles over the edge – almost dropping them, mortar rounds of ice – to be rewarded with satisfying “cluncsh” sounds as the snowball exploded across someone’s windshield.

This was made even easier since, in the winter, the road was always packed was always slow going.

There would be thunks and then the sound of braking over ice. Sometimes people would figure out where we were shelling them from, and scream impotently at us. Some would even get out of their cars in a vain attempt to find a way up the cliff to “get us.” This was a tactical mistake as it opened them up for a volley targeted directly at their personage.

We had the advantage of terrain and the protection of the forest.

My favorite memory of this goes thus:

Once, someone called the cops on us. This was rare to the point of unthinkability: most people simply accepted that they’d been ‘balled and drove on, muttering about “lousy kids.” This was not to say that cop cars (usually sheriffs) were uncommon on the road: far from it. We simply had a protocol when one was spotted: duck and hide.

So one day we saw a cop car coming and we did just that. There were maybe five of us that day, and we all dropped prone in the snow, waiting for him to pass. Only, he didn’t.

Instead, we heard the sound of a bullhorn. He was telling us to stop and (most ludicrous of all) that he knew who we were (couldn’t possibly: we were covered head to toe in ski gear) and that he knew our parents, and was going to tell on us, and that we were in trouble, and so forth.

It took all of thirty seconds of hushed discussion to recognize the bullshit of these statements. However, we also knew that our fun was done for the day. But there was a stack of snowballs left.

I’d never heard a police officer curse before, let alone hear one curse through a bullhorn, and the memory of that alone keeps me warm at night some times.

Of course, we hot-footed it out after that, each splitting off in a different direction to our homes, where we were rewarded with hot cocoa and a warm fireplace. “Just having fun sledding, mom. Got into a snowball fight.”

We loved this activity so much that we did it in the summer months, too. Of course, we didn’t have snowballs. Instead, we used dirt clods.

The soil at the edge of the cliff was soft. When it was dry, it would crumble easily – more easily than a snowball – but it could be hefted and thrown. We used to throw them at one another. They didn’t hurt in the slightest: just exploded on impact leaving the target in need of a bath.

There was a short window of opportunity for this every day, usually between three and four o’clock in the afternoon. That was when the earth was dry and cracked. After four o’clock, it would usually rain for ten minutes or so, turning our clods into “mud”.

Of course we had that here!
Instead of snowballs, kids used bricks, and threw them from freeway overpasses. Sometimes they’d break a windshield and kill someone, and if they got caught, they got shot at instead of yelled at.

I got hit with a dirt clod directly in the bean when I was 6 years old, it had a rock in it and you can still see the scar when I scrunch up my face. My mother told me, on the way to the hospital, and I will never forget it “Bob, you need to learn to not block things with your head.”